Chapter Twenty-Six - Benedict
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Benedict
COLE COMES BACK for his things on Sunday.
I hear the key and I’m up off the couch too fast, and I say his name, and he doesn’t answer. He just goes to his room and starts putting shirts in a bag. I stand in his doorway and watch him do it. He folds each one. Cole never folds anything.
He’s folding shirts so he doesn’t have to look at me.
“You don’t have to move out,” I say.
“I’m staying at Reyes’s for a while.” He sets the bag down and reaches for the stuff on his desk. “It’s easier.”
“Cole. Please just let me say the one thing and then I’ll shut up. Indie didn’t know. She wasn’t in on any of it. Whatever Jack told you about pity—”
“Don’t.” He says it quietly, which is worse than loud.
He holds a phone charger in both hands and looks at it instead of me.
“You know what I keep landing on? I couldn’t figure out why a girl like that would ever laugh at my jokes.
And I told myself, stop it, man. She just likes you.
And it turns out I was right the first time.
There was a reason. There was a whole plan.
” His voice stays level the entire way through, and that’s the part that takes the wind out of me.
“You built me a girlfriend because you felt sorry for me. That’s not a favor, Ben.
That’s the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me, and you did it because you care.
I can’t even be angry at it right. I don’t know where to put it. ”
“That’s not what it was—”
“Then what was it.” He finally looks at me.
“Because here’s the thing I can’t get around.
You looked at me, and you looked at her, and some part of you decided I couldn’t get there on my own.
That I needed a running start she didn’t know she was giving me.
You can dress that up however you want. Underneath it is you thinking I wasn’t enough.
” He isn’t angry saying it. He’s just tired.
And sure. “And the worst part is, you weren’t wrong to think it.
I couldn’t say two words to her. I needed the help.
So now I get to know that the best thing that ever happened to me happened because my friend ran a charity for the kid who couldn’t do it himself. ”
“You’re not a charity, Cole—”
“I know it’s not what you meant.” He zips the bag. “It’s what it is anyway.”
He gets the last of it and stops in front of me, because I’m still in the doorway, because some idiot part of me thinks that if I stand here long enough, the right sentence will arrive.
It doesn’t. I don’t have a right sentence for this.
I have charm, and charm is the thing that built the trap, and I can see him waiting for me to try it, almost hoping I will, so he’ll have something clean to hate.
I step out of the way instead.
He leaves. The door does the soft click it always does. The one you never notice until it’s the only sound in the place.
***
I don’t sleep. Around two I end up on the floor of the living room with my back against the couch, looking at the shelf where Cole keeps, kept, his stuff, and there’s a photo still up there that he forgot.
Doubles, sophomore year. Me and Jack, both of us squinting, a little trophy between us that meant nothing.
Some regional thing. Jack’s arm is around my neck. He’s laughing at something off-camera.
I look at that photo now and I can’t find the guy in it. The one Jack’s laughing next to. I’ve spent a lot of energy making sure I couldn’t.
So I make myself find him.
Here is the week I have never let myself walk through in order.
Conference finals, sophomore spring. Jack and I are the two seed.
His whole deal at this school runs on it, his scholarship is a year-to-year thing, results-based, and a strong conference showing is how he keeps it.
I know that. He’s told me a hundred times, half-joking the way you joke about a thing that’s actually your throat.
Win or I’m bagging groceries in Ohio, partner.
The night before the semi, there’s a party at the lake house.
I go. Of course I go; I go to everything.
Going has never cost me anything. I tell Jack to come and he says no, he wants to sleep, he wants to be right for the morning.
I tell him he’s being dramatic. I remember saying that word.
Dramatic. I stay till three. I show up to the match on four hours and a headache and my usual belief that it will sort itself out, because it always sorts itself out, because I’m good enough half-asleep to beat most people awake.
We lose. Not because of one thing, tennis is never one thing, but I’m a step slow all afternoon, and I miss two returns I make in my sleep, and at four-all in the third I hit a lazy first serve and get it jammed down my throat.
And I laugh.
I laugh. At four-all. In the third. At the match that is Jack’s whole life.
I’m not laughing at him, I’m laughing because that’s what I do when something slips.
I make it small so it can’t touch me. I look over to share it, and Jack is staring at me like he’s never seen me before.
Like he’s doing math on every hour of the last three years.
We lose the next two games. His ranking slides. The scholarship committee meets that summer and it’s gone, and then he’s gone off the team, and the whole time I keep telling him it’ll be fine, he’ll land somewhere, these things work out.
There was one afternoon he tried to make me understand. I’d forgotten it until tonight. He caught me outside the courts, right after the committee’s letter, and he wasn’t yelling. He was worse than yelling. He was steady.
“Do you get what happened,” he said. “Say it back to me. I want to hear you say what happened.”
“You had a bad conference. It’s one result, Jack, you’ll—”
“You were out till three the night before my life.” Still steady.
“And you laughed. At four-all. I’ve been trying for a week to think of the version where that’s okay, and I can’t build it.
There isn’t one.” He waited. He was actually giving me the chance, right there, to be a person about it. “Tell me you know that.”
And I said, come on, man, don’t make it a whole thing.
Those words. To that face. Because a whole thing was heavy, and heavy was for other people, and I honestly believed that if I kept it light, he’d catch up to me and we’d be fine.
He didn’t make it a whole thing. He just stopped. Stopped calling, stopped sitting at our table, stopped being someone I had. And I let him. And told myself he’d gotten dramatic. And never once said the true sentence, which was: I did that to you, and I could have not.
I brought a case of good beer to his place a week later and gave him the grin and said we’re good, right? And he looked at me for a long time. And he said yeah.
And he meant no. And I took the yeah, because the yeah was easier, and I went back to my life, which was still, somehow, completely intact.
That’s the guy in the photo. That’s who Jack’s laughing next to. A guy who could stand in the exact center of someone else’s catastrophe and feel a light breeze.
***
The part I really can’t sit with comes after, and it has Cole in it, which is why I think I finally let myself look.
Those weeks, Jack freezing me out, the friendship going down without my consent or, honestly, my full attention — I decided I was the one being wronged.
Jack had gotten weird. Jack had gotten cold and dropped me over a tennis match, which seemed, from inside my sealed little life, like an overreaction.
Poor me. And you know who showed up for poor me?
Cole. Every match that spring, there was Cole in the second row with two coffees and a bad joke, holding the line for a version of me that didn’t deserve one square inch of it.
He thought he was helping his friend through a rough patch.
He didn’t know his friend was the rough patch.
So I’ve now done it to both of them. I let Jack pay for me sophomore year and called him dramatic.
I let Cole pick me up, and then, two years later, I lit a match in front of the one good thing Cole ever got, and handed it to the guy I’d already ruined once.
Same move, twice. Somebody stands close to me.
Somebody pays. I walk out the other side with my hair still perfect.
Julian finds me still on the floor in the morning. He doesn’t ask why I’m down there. He sits on the couch above me and puts a coffee by my hand and lets me get to it.
“I can’t fix it by being charming,” I say. It comes out flat. “That’s the whole — every tool I have makes it worse. If I go to Cole and I’m smooth, he hates me more, and he’s right to. Jack’s had my number for three years. The only thing I’ve ever been good at is the exact thing that did this.”
“So don’t be charming,” Julian says.
“I don’t know what’s under it.” That’s the true one. The one I’ve been circling all night. “I’ve never had to find out. I’m twenty-two and I genuinely do not know what Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne is once you turn the lights off the good side of his face.”
Julian drinks his coffee. He’s known me since we were fourteen. He doesn’t rush to tell me I’m wrong, which is how I know he’s wondered the same thing.
“You want to know what’s under it,” he says.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. It comes out maybe twice a year, for about ten minutes, and then you paint over it.
It came out sophomore year for exactly one week, and you’ve spent the two years since making sure it never happened again.
It came out at that fundraiser, when you built the whole thing yourself and beat her by fourteen cents and didn’t gloat once.
” He shrugs. “There’s a guy in there who tries.
He’s just never been allowed to lose anything, so you keep him in a drawer.
That’s the tragedy of you, Ben. Not that there’s nothing under the charm.
That there’s a decent man under it you’ve been too comfortable to let out. ”
I don’t say anything. He lets me not say anything.
“Then find out fast,” he says finally. “Because Indie’s the one wearing this, and she didn’t do anything.
Cole’s a mess, and he’ll grovel his way back eventually — that’s a Cole problem and a Cole solution.
But Indie got called a liar in front of three hundred people for a thing that was true and clean and hers, and right now the whole school thinks she ran some cruel little con on a nice boy.
That doesn’t fix itself. That needs somebody to stand up and say what actually happened.
Out loud. With their name on it. At a cost.” He looks down at me.
“You’re good at names. You just usually put them on trophies. ”
***
I sit with that all day. I’d have sat with it longer if I hadn’t gone out for food and run straight into what it looks like from the outside.
Two girls I half-know are ahead of me in the sandwich line, and they’re talking about it, the way you talk about a thing that isn’t yours to be hurt by.
One of them calls it the tennis thing. The other says she heard the whole relationship was a bet, that Indie and the Astor girl picked out the shy guy and ran a number on him for fun, and isn’t that dark, and God, imagine being that guy.
They aren’t cruel about it. That’s the sick part.
They’re enjoying it, lightly, the way I have enjoyed a thousand things lightly.
And the story they’re passing back and forth has Indie Roy cast as the villain, cold, calculating — and it is the exact reverse of the truth, and it is already the official version.
Then I actually see her.
Indie. Across the dining hall. Alone, eating fast, the way you eat when you just want to be done being visible.
She has her hood up. Indie Roy, who lights up a bus at six in the morning, sitting under a hood, trying to take up less space.
Somebody at a far table laughs, and she flinches and checks whether it’s aimed at her.
It isn’t. She couldn’t have known that. So she flinched anyway.
She used to be the warmest room in any building. Now she’s checking exits.
I don’t go over. I’d make it worse; I’m radioactive to her by now, and rightly.
I put my sandwich back and leave. But I carry her out with me, the hood, the flinch, the checking — and it does what two years of nothing failed to do.
It makes the bill real. Not an idea about carelessness.
A person. Eating under a hood. Paying for me.
The thing I keep running into isn’t whether I can do it.
It’s that I can’t see a version where it works and gets me anything.
If I stand up and tell the truth, I confirm, in public, that I’m the guy who schemes and ruins things.
That Jack was right. That I float and other people drown.
Charlotte will hear it and it’ll just be the last brick in the case she’s already closed on me.
Cole won’t come back to me for it. Indie owes me nothing.
There is no ending where I do the hard thing and get to keep my face.
And somewhere in the afternoon, I understand that this is the point. That’s what a bill is. You don’t pay it to get something.
You pay it because you owe it.
I have spent my whole life on the other math.
I only ever put in effort where there was a trophy at the end, a match, a grade, a girl who said no long enough to be interesting.
Everything without a prize attached, I called not worth it.
I was proud of that. I thought it made me easy to be around.
The not-worth-it pile is where I put Jack.
It’s where I’d have put this, six months ago.
It turns out the not-worth-it pile is just the pile of people who were counting on me and learned not to.
I keep thinking about a thing Julian’s said for years, that I enjoy everything and earned none of it.
He means it fond. It’s not fond. It’s a diagnosis.
You can’t value a thing you didn’t pay for, and I have never paid for anything, so I’ve never valued anything, so it has never hurt to lose.
Until her. Until this. Until a girl under a hood in a dining hall.
The hurt is the receipt. I’m holding my first one.
I don’t have a plan. That’s her department, not mine. But I know the shape of the thing I have to do, and for the first time in my life it has no upside, no trophy, no clean face at the end, maybe not even a thank-you — and I want to do it anyway. I sit with how new that is.
It feels like the first honest muscle I’ve ever used.
I’m still sitting with it when someone knocks on the door.
Not Cole’s knock. I know every knock that door gets, and I don’t know this one.
It’s light and even and it comes exactly twice, a knock with no wasted motion in it, and I get up to answer it with my heart doing something stupid before my head has caught up to why.